The Whispering Swarm Read Online Free Page B

me, got work as a supply typist between jobs. We were both superfast, which made us always employable. Only John Brunner was self-employed, somehow running a flat in Hampstead, a Morgan sports car and a Gibson guitar. Maybe he had money. He was rumoured to be from a posh background. His voice was the exaggerated bray of a RAF officer. He wore a Vandyke beard and moustache, an ascot, a maroon velvet jacket and baggy flannel trousers and smoked expensive cigarettes from a tortoiseshell holder. As the outspoken American writer Harry Harrison put it, John had got himself up in the complete Hampstead left-wing intellectual set. He had a CND button in his lapel. He was a socialist. He had written the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s marching song ‘Don’t You Hear the H-bomb’s Thunder?’ and was famous for following the Aldermaston March in his Morgan. He wrote science fantasy with tremendous brio. His first, The Wanton of Argus, came out in the pulpiest of pulps while he sold sophisticated hard SF to the prestigious Astounding . His posh drawl, however, unlike Wyndham’s or Allard’s, got people’s backs up. He had a way of treading on their toes. He never meant to be rude, but he wouldn’t learn. I tried to tell him he irritated people. He explained how I was wrong. He would die of a heart attack at an SF convention in Glasgow, an embittered shadow of his former self.
    Another friend made through ‘fandom’ was Ray Napoleon, a kind of modern-day remittance man. Ray’s parents had sent him to Europe after he’d refused to marry a girl he had made pregnant. He’d been told to stay there, on a modest stipend, until he matured. The logic was a bit strange. Ray was perfectly happy with the arrangement. He said he had been sent away to save his mother and father embarrassment. From San Francisco, Ray was heavily built with dark, Italianate features. I remember meeting a Bay Area folk-singing couple who brought their baby to a London gig. I asked the man if they knew Ray. His face clouded. ‘Ray’s not our kind of people,’ he said. The woman merely smiled. When I looked into the carrycot, there was a miniature version of Ray looking back at me. At sixteen I went to stay with him in Paris. That was my first big step towards becoming an adult. I met a whole bunch of writers and musicians in the couple of weeks I was there. I even had a brief vision of the four musketeers walking arm in arm out of the Luxembourg Gardens, coming down Boulevard Saint-Michel towards me. I wasn’t fazed. I’d had similar flashes all my life. I always knew that these visions weren’t real. They were just something I could do.
    Still relatively sparsely populated, extremely relaxed and unjudgmental, Paris was one huge vision to me. Never scarred by the war, she had a beauty I could hardly believe was real. Foreigners were slowly drifting back to the city. Ray had a Swedish guitarist friend, Monica Helander, who sang old music hall songs at a little tourist cabaret in Montmartre. On Sundays, she would drive her Citro ë n 2CV down onto the cobbles of the quay and, under the golden chestnut trees, would wash it with water drawn directly from the Seine. Today, you aren’t even allowed to go there on foot! We would take a bottle of wine and play in the bays under the embankment, where you could get a good echo. I took over from Monica for a gig or two, learning to sing interminable verses of ‘Clementine’ and ‘Careless Love’, which all the tourists seemed to like and which, happily, I could play. I wasn’t great, but you didn’t have to be in those more-innocent and less-demanding days. I went reluctantly back to London in an ambitious mood. I would return to Paris at least once a year after that.
    My fanzine improved considerably once I was in touch with fandom. Like most British musicians at that time, talented SF people were semipro. The fields